StarCraft, Warcraft, and Diablo are the three pillars that hold up Blizzard’s roof. With Diablo 3 not hitting as hard as Blizzard would’ve hoped, StarCraft 2 being split into three stories delivered over many years, and World of Warcraft slowly losing subscriptions, the House of Blizzard is beginning to get shakier than in previous years. In an effort to reinforce that roof, Blizzard is adding a fourth pillar, the online CCG Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft. We spent some time with (and some money on) the closed beta to see what we could see.

Two things are instantly noticeable when starting up your first game of Hearthstone. First, it’s your basic, extremely simple card battler — the likes of which plague the iOS App Store. Second, the production values are through that aforementioned roof Blizzard is attempting to reinforce.

The game itself is quite simple. Players assume the role of a hero from the Warcraft universe, each with 30 health and a deck of 30 cards. Decks can only contain two instances of a given card, and only one instance of card with a legendary rarity. On a player’s turn, he or she will automatically generate one crystal of mana, up to a maximum of 10 crystals. The goal is to utilize that mana — which regenerates at the beginning of every turn — to summon creatures and cast spells that drain your opponent’s life. To do this, you choose what your creatures and spells target. Easy peasy.

While one can summarize a complex TCG (trading card game) like Magic: the Gathering as “use creatures and spells to drain your opponent’s life, and you don’t even have hero characters,” MTG is infinitely more complex than Hearthstone. It’s difficult to discuss the actual gameplay of Blizzard’s new card brawler, but that’s because we’ve already done it. Sure, different creatures have different abilities, and there are the occasional spells or Yu-Gi-Oh style trap cards that stay hidden until something triggers it, but the game plays more simple than even “heroes, creatures, traps, and spells” sounds.

What makes Hearthstone a little different from the competition is that each hero is a class, similar to the game’s World of Warcraft namesake, and thus have class-specific abilities. In Hearthstone’s case, this means class-specific cards. The mage, for instance, has some powerful spells that inflict damage, while the hunter is more focused on granting bonuses to beast-type creatures. Along with that, each class has their own spell that acts as something of a permanent card; it still costs an amount of mana to activate it every turn, but it’s always there. There is also a weapon slot, which is a card that allows your hero to directly attack creatures, but only for a certain amount of turns.

Next page: Are there any gameplay subtleties? What about deck building?